Opinion | How the freak show took over America (2024)

Since the republic’s founding, strippers and p*rn actresses haven’t typically graced the narratives of America’s first families. Neither has hush money. Nor co*ke habits. Yet here we are. And I believe that much of the Sturm und Dreck of the current moment goes back to a time, precisely 30 years ago, when another pair of legal dramas preoccupied the nation. I am of the firm belief that those two eerily synchronous news events — in May and June of 1994 — would set off a tsunami of sex, scandal, shamelessness and baldfaced lying, the effects of which still ripple across the culture.

On May 6, 1994, a former Arkansas government employee named Paula Jones filed a lawsuit accusing President Bill Clinton of sexual harassment. She alleged that three years before, when he was governor of the state, Clinton had exposed himself to her in a Little Rock hotel room; Clinton denied the claims. The case would pit Jones and her far-right supporters against the president and his formidable legal and political teams; Clinton allies would use a volley of innuendo to try to impugn Jones’s reputation and undermine her charges. The showdown set in motion a five-year saga of prosecutorial overreach, political fisticuffs and sleaze, culminating in the president’s impeachment by the House and acquittal by the Senate in 1999.

On June 17, 1994 — six weeks after Jones filed her suit — the former football star O.J. Simpson got in a white Ford Bronco and tried to elude a cordon of police, setting off a gonzo “slow-speed chase” that was televised live before an audience of about 95 million. After surrendering to authorities, he would be charged with the stabbing deaths of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. To many, the ensuing legal extravaganza, culminating in Simpson being found not guilty, would be the first real-world reality-TV show — a serial melodrama that would consume the country for over a year.

At the time, the two legal showdowns seemed so sui generis bizarro that they were treated like cultural anomalies. Coverage of the Jones case, as hard as it is to believe today, was initially thought to be too tawdry (a president accused of sex crimes?) to merit much oxygen in the mainstream media. Largely dismissed as a nuisance suit, it was relegated to talk radio, tabloids and the dank recesses of a new realm called the World Wide Web. By 1998, however, two new news-and-opinion outlets, the Drudge Report (launched in 1995) and Fox News (launched the following year) — along with a special prosecutor appointed to look into Clinton’s potential misdeeds (and, soon enough, his sexual encounters) — quickly escalated the Jones case into front-page news.

When it was disclosed that the president had an ongoing affair with a White House intern, the news cycle began to take on overtly sexual overtones. The Starr Report alone, whose 7,793 pages took forever to download on the internet, was so sexually graphic that journalist Renata Adler would describe it as “a voluminous work of demented p*rnography.” The whole pathetic spectacle was best summed up by Philip Roth, who would write in his novel The Human Stain: “It was the summer when a president’s penis was on everyone’s mind, and life, in all its shameless impurity, once again confounded America.”

By then, the Simpson “trial of the century” had already begun to turn television news into 24/7 entertainment. The courtroom drama had such an oddball ensemble of misfits, snappily suited lawyers and publicity hounds that it seemed less a murder trial than a circus troupe. There was testimony about rampant drug use, a quickie book describing sexcapades and defense attorney kayfabe out of the pro wrestling playbook. There was Judge Lance Ito; Brian “Kato” Kaelin, the houseguest; Brown Simpson’s Akita, also named Kato. Simpson’s ex-girlfriend Paula Barbieri, Brown Simpson’s friend Faye Resnick and a member of the jury would all make cameos in Playboy. The nightly parade of TV “experts” (Greta Van Susteren, Geraldo Rivera, Gerry Spence in his Stetson) became cable’s equivalent of Weegee: a smorgasbord of voyeurism and gore. And don’t forget Simpson’s attorney friend Robert Kardashian, the patriarch of what would become an entire brood of reality-TV stars.

Inside the courtroom and out, the cast was playing to the cameras. As a result, the trial, which became a limited, perpetually bingeable series, pulverized the notion of legal ethics — indeed, of reality itself — in the American mind. As author Jonathan Schell would write, the Simpson and Clinton dramas proved to be beta tests for what Schell called a “new media machine” that chose to elevate “the trifling (sex and lies about sex) to earthshaking (impeachment of a President and damage to the constitutional system) … [and] may have fatally tipped a newly endangered balance of power: the balance between fantasy and reality.” The June 1994 Bronco chase, Schell believed, was the pivot point: “At that moment, virtual reality and plain old-fashioned reality were inextricably fused in some new way.”

At the time, the cases against Clinton and Simpson were anomalies: skeevy freak shows amid the vanilla pageant of public life. By the year 2000, both presidential candidates — George W. Bush and Al Gore — would run on the idea that they would bring back “normalcy” to a country ravaged by a loss of “values.” They failed miserably. Instead, in the three decades since this saga began, the freakish has become the norm. Themes long pushed to the culture’s fringe have winded up front and center. Come 2024, we can barely follow the plot, due to the constant barrage of scandal, unimaginably bad choices, and social media memes — each more outrageous than the last.

In September 2023, for instance, a video surfaced showing Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) sitting in the audience of a Denver theater and appearing to grope the genital area of a male companion during a performance of the musical “Beetlejuice.” A months later, camera footage emerged of two men engaged in a sex act in the hearing room of the Hart Senate Office Building. Such dumpster fires have continued to blaze. Last month, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — an alleged serial philanderer, former heroin addict and espouser of conspiracy theories — claimed that doctors he consulted in 2010 had found a dead worm in his brain. Also in May, on the floor of the House, two legislators traded insults that are usually reserved for the schoolyard. After Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) criticized Jasmine Crockett (D-Tex.), saying “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading,” Crockett shot back, denouncing Greene for her “bleach-blond, bad-built, butch body.”

It doesn’t stop. Beyond the hallowed halls of Congress, pop culture is awash in explicit sex, from Miranda July’s novel “All Fours” (whose tales of desire and fantasy are scorching book clubs) to eye-popping Season 3 of “Bridgerton” on Netflix (with its depictions of saucy Regency-era romps). And every other month, it seems, another teacher or professor loses a job in academia because, in their off hours, they also happen to be posting DIY adult-only pictures or videos on their OnlyFans accounts. Shame on them. Or not.

There are myriad reasons for the normalization of all this seediness and neediness. But the causes are, at root, threefold.

First, our chief executives, over time, became ever more adroit at offering master classes in how to deceive. This began long before and continued long after the ’90s, with Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon (lying about Vietnam); then Ronald Reagan, the consummate actor (never mentioning AIDS during his first term); then Clinton (impeached for lying under oath); to George W. Bush (lying about the “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq and his FEMA director Michael D. Brown doing a “heckuva job” in response to Hurricane Katrina). It was only a matter of time before this Age of the Long Lie would produce a leader like Donald Trump, whose untruths break the reality meter so often that they bring to mind the classic line that Mary McCarthy levied against Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” For a broad swath of citizens, outright lying in the short term (as a way of securing long-term goals) had become a tactic, a way to behave, a kind of accepted ethical tic.

Second, at some point since the Jones filing and the Simpson verdict, we simply lost our collective sense of shame. As Christopher Hitchens once wrote in a 1996 Vanity Fair column, tabloid culture somehow made America “almost impossible to embarrass.” Narcissists began to inflate their own value in society in a profoundly new manner. Haters began to stew in their fear and loathing; many reveled in taking down people they perceived as more damaged or, in many cases, more fortunate, than themselves. Shame became archaic, a remnant of a bygone era of civility and decency. To quote the sage Hitch: “There is a good reason the words ‘shameful’ and ‘shameless’ define the same conduct. You know you’ve behaved shamefully if you have exposed other people to needless annoyance or embarrassment. You don’t know you’ve behaved shamelessly if you don’t get this point.”

Finally, speaking of the reality-TV circuses of Clinton and Simpson, there was reality TV itself. Starting in 1992, with MTV’s “The Real World,” the first contemporary reality show, the genre completely seeped into the behavioral bloodstream. Thereafter, the great audience called America became a mass of hardwired exhibitionists. Their public and private comportment, even their sex lives, were inadvertently shaped by the tropes and rituals of such shows: the rehearsed outrage, the faux flirtations and, as Shakespeare had already told us, the belief that all life is a stage. And with the rise of social media in the early 2000s, the deal was sealed. In the ’90s, few personalities — several dozen, at most — were positioned at the white-hot core of the insanity. Now, billions of so-called users seek followers; the virtual merges with the actual; and the loudest, shiniest car crash earns the most likes. We used to hesitate before staring at a car crash, attempting a modicum of decorum. Now, fools rush over en masse, our better angels having already fled.

Perhaps Stormy Daniels put it best. When offering a rationale for why she continued to remain in contact with the man who she claimed had insisted, after their tryst, that she watch a documentary about shark attacks: “I wanted to maintain that sort of relationship because the chance to be on ‘The Apprentice’ was still up in the air. It would have been a great thing.” And who can argue with that?